both her beautiful white hands—”do not read De Quincey.
You have your Belloc, your Chesterton, your Bernard
Shaw—why should you read De Quincey?”
“But I do read De Quincey,” Ralph protested, “more
than Belloc and Chesterton, anyhow.”
“Indeed!” exclaimed Mrs. Cosham, with a gesture of
surprise and relief mingled. “You are, then, a ‘rara avis’ in
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your generation. I am delighted to meet anyone who reads
De Quincey.”
Here she hollowed her hand into a screen, and, leaning
towards Katharine, inquired, in a very audible whisper,
“Does your friend write?”
“Mr. Denham,” said Katharine, with more than her usual
clearness and firmness, “writes for the Review. He is a
lawyer.”
“The clean-shaven lips, showing the expression of the
mouth! I recognize them at once. I always feel at home
with lawyers, Mr. Denham—”
“They used to come about so much in the old days,”
Mrs. Milvain interposed, the frail, silvery notes of her
voice falling with the sweet tone of an old bell.
“You say you live at Highgate,” she continued. “I wonder
whether you happen to know if there is an old house
called Tempest Lodge still in existence—an old white
house in a garden?”
Ralph shook his head, and she sighed.
“Ah, no; it must have been pulled down by this time,
with all the other old houses. There were such pretty
lanes in those days. That was how your uncle met your
Aunt Emily, you know,” she addressed Katharine. “They
walked home through the lanes.”
“A sprig of May in her bonnet,” Mrs. Cosham ejaculated,
reminiscently.
“And next Sunday he had violets in his buttonhole. And
that was how we guessed.”
Katharine laughed. She looked at Ralph. His eyes were
meditative, and she wondered what he found in this old
gossip to make him ponder so contentedly. She felt, she
hardly knew why, a curious pity for him.
“Uncle John—yes, ‘poor John,’ you always called him.
Why was that?” she asked, to make them go on talking,
which, indeed, they needed little invitation to do.
“That was what his father, old Sir Richard, always called
him. Poor John, or the fool of the family,” Mrs. Milvain
hastened to inform them. “The other boys were so brilliant,
and he could never pass his examinations, so they
sent him to India—a long voyage in those days, poor
fellow. You had your own room, you know, and you did it
up. But he will get his knighthood and a pension, I be
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lieve,” she said, turning to Ralph, “only it is not England.”
“No,” Mrs. Cosham confirmed her, “it is not England. In
those days we thought an Indian Judgeship about equal
to a county-court judgeship at home. His Honor—a pretty
title, but still, not at the top of the tree. However,” she
sighed, “if you have a wife and seven children, and people
nowadays very quickly forget your father’s name—well,
you have to take what you can get,” she concluded.
“And I fancy,” Mrs. Milvain resumed, lowering her voice
rather confidentially, “that John would have done more
if it hadn’t been for his wife, your Aunt Emily. She was a
very good woman, devoted to him, of course, but she was
not ambitious for him, and if a wife isn’t ambitious for
her husband, especially in a profession like the law, clients
soon get to know of it. In our young days, Mr.
Denham, we used to say that we knew which of our friends
would become judges, by looking at the girls they married.
And so it was, and so, I fancy, it always will be. I
don’t think,” she added, summing up these scattered remarks,
“that any man is really happy unless he succeeds
in his profession.”
Mrs. Cosham approved of this sentiment with more ponderous
sagacity from her side of the tea-table, in the first
place by swaying her head, and in the second by remarking:
“No, men are not the same as women. I fancy Alfred
Tennyson spoke the truth about that as about many other
things. How I wish he’d lived to write ‘The Prince’—a
sequel to ‘The Princess’! I confess I’m almost tired of
Princesses. We want some one to show us what a good
man can be. We have Laura and Beatrice, Antigone and
Cordelia, but we have no heroic man. How do you, as a
poet, account for that, Mr. Denham?”
“I’m not a poet,” said Ralph good-humoredly. “I’m only
a solicitor.”
“But you write, too?” Mrs. Cosham demanded, afraid
lest she should be balked of her priceless discovery, a
young man truly devoted to literature.
“In my spare time,” Denham reassured her.
“In your spare time!” Mrs. Cosham echoed. “That is a
proof of devotion, indeed.” She half closed her eyes, and
indulged herself in a fascinating picture of a briefless
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barrister lodged in a garret, writing immortal novels by
the light of a farthing dip. But the romance which fell
upon the figures of great writers and illumined their pages
was no false radiance in her case. She carried her pocket
Shakespeare about with her, and met life fortified by the
words of the poets. How far she saw Denham, and how far
she confused him with some hero of fiction, it would be
hard to say. Literature had taken possession even of her
memories. She was matching him, presumably, with certain
characters in the old novels, for she came out, after
a pause, with:
“Um—um—Pendennis—Warrington—I could never forgive
Laura,” she pronounced energetically, “for not marrying
George, in spite of everything. George Eliot did the
very same thing; and Lewes was a little frog-faced man,
with the manner of a dancing master. But Warrington,
now, had everything in his favor; intellect, passion, romance,
distinction, and the connection was a mere piece
of undergraduate folly. Arthur, I confess, has always
seemed to me a bit of a fop; I can’t imagine how Laura
married him. But you say you’re a solicitor, Mr. Denham.
Now there are one or two things I should like to ask
you—about Shakespeare—” She drew out her small, worn
volume with some difficulty, opened it, and shook it in
the air. “They say, nowadays, that Shakespeare was a lawyer.
They say, that accounts for his knowledge of human
nature. There’s a fine example for you, Mr. Denham. Study
your clients, young man, and the world will be the richer
one of these days, I have no doubt. Tell me, how do we
come out of it, now; better or worse than you expected?”
Thus called upon to sum up the worth of human nature
in a few words, Ralph answered unhesitatingly:
“Worse, Mrs. Cosham, a good deal worse. I’m afraid the
ordinary man is a bit of a rascal—”
“And the ordinary woman?”
“No, I don’t like the ordinary woman either—”
Ah, dear me, I’ve no doubt that’s very true, very true.”
Mrs. Cosham sighed. “Swift would have agreed with you,
anyhow—” She looked at him, and thought that there
were signs of distinct power in his brow. He would do
well, she thought, to devote himself to satire.
“Charles Lavington, you remember, was a solicitor,” Mrs.
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Milvain interposed, rather resenting the waste of time
involved in talking about fictitious people when you might
be talking about real people. “But you wouldn’t remember
him, Katharine.”
“Mr. Lavington? Oh, yes, I do,” said Katharine, waking
from other thoughts with her little start. “The summer
we had a house near Tenby. I remember the field and the
pond with the tadpoles, and making haystacks with Mr.
Lavington.”
“She is right. There was a pond with tadpoles,” Mrs.
Cosham corroborated. “Millais made studies of it for
‘Ophelia.’ Some say that is the best picture he ever
painted—”
“And I remember the dog chained up in the yard, and
the dead snakes hanging in the toolhouse.”
“It was at Tenby that you were chased by the bull,”
Mrs. Milvain continued. “But that you couldn’t remember,
though it’s true you were a wonderful child. Such
eyes she had, Mr. Denham! I used to say to her father,
‘She’s watching us, and summing us all up in her little
mind.’ And they had a nurse in those days,” she went on,
telling her story with charming solemnity to Ralph, “who
was a good woman, but engaged to a sailor. When she
ought to have been attending to the baby, her eyes were
on the sea. And Mrs. Hilbery allowed this girl—Susan her
name was—to have him to stay in the village. They abused
her goodness, I’m sorry to say, and while they walked in
the lanes, they stood the perambulator alone in a field
where there was a bull. The animal became enraged by
the red blanket in the perambulator, and Heaven knows
what might have happened if a gentleman had not been
walking by in the nick of time, and rescued Katharine in
his arms!”
“I think the bull was only a cow, Aunt Celia,” said
Katharine.
“My darling, it was a great red Devonshire bull, and not
long after it gored a man to death and had to be destroyed.
And your mother forgave Susan—a thing I could
never have done.”
“Maggie’s sympathies were entirely with Susan and the
sailor, I am sure,” said Mrs. Cosham, rather tartly. “My
sister-in-law,” she continued, “has laid her burdens upon
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Providence at every crisis in her life, and Providence, I
must confess, has responded nobly, so far—”
“Yes,” said Katharine, with a laugh, for she liked the
rashness which irritated the rest of the family. “My
mother’s bulls always turn into cows at the critical moment.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Milvain, “I’m glad you have some one
to protect you from bulls now.”
“I can’t imagine William protecting any one from bulls,”
said Katharine.
It happened that Mrs. Cosham had once more produced
her pocket volume of Shakespeare, and was consulting
Ralph upon an obscure passage in “Measure for Measure.”
He did not at once seize the meaning of what Katharine
and her aunt were saying; William, he supposed, referred
to some small cousin, for he now saw Katharine as a child
in a pinafore; but, nevertheless, he was so much distracted
that his eye could hardly follow the words on the
paper. A moment later he heard them speak distinctly of
an engagement ring.
“I like rubies,” he heard Katharine say.
“To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendant world… .”
Mrs. Cosham intoned; at the same instant “Rodney”
fitted itself to “William” in Ralph’s mind. He felt convinced
that Katharine was engaged to Rodney. His first
sensation was one of violent rage with her for having
deceived him throughout the visit, fed him with pleasant
old wives’ tales, let him see her as a child playing in a
meadow, shared her youth with him, while all the time
she was a stranger entirely, and engaged to marry Rodney.
But was it possible? Surely it was not possible. For in
his eyes she was still a child. He paused so long over the
book that Mrs. Cosham had time to look over his shoulder
and ask her niece:
“And have you settled upon a house yet, Katharine?”
This convinced him of the truth of the monstrous idea.
He looked up at once and said:
“Yes, it’s a difficult passage.”
His voice had changed so much, he spoke with such
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curtness and even with such contempt, that Mrs. Cosham
looked at him fairly puzzled. Happily she belonged to a
generation which expected uncouthness in its men, and
she merely felt convinced that this Mr. Denham was very,
very clever. She took back her Shakespeare, as Denham
seemed to have no more to say, and secreted it once
more about her person with the infinitely pathetic resignation
of the old.
“Katharine’s engaged to William Rodney,” she said, by
way of filling in the pause; “a very old friend of ours. He
has a wonderful knowledge of literature, too—wonderful.”
She nodded her head rather vaguely. “You should
meet each other.”
Denham’s one wish was to leave the house as soon as
he could; but the elderly ladies had risen, and were proposing
to visit Mrs. Hilbery in her bedroom, so that any
move on his part was impossible. At the same time, he
wished to say something, but he knew not what, to
Katharine alone. She took her aunts upstairs, and returned,
coming towards him once more with an air of innocence
and friendliness that amazed him.
“My father will be back,” she said. “Won’t you sit down?”
and she laughed, as if now they might share a perfectly
friendly laugh at the tea-party.
But Ralph made no attempt to seat himself.
“I must congratulate you,” he said. “It was news to
me.” He saw her face change, but only to become graver
than before.
“My engagement?” she asked. “Yes, I am going to marry
William Rodney.”
Ralph remained standing with his hand on the back of
a chair in absolute silence. Abysses seemed to plunge
into darkness between them. He looked at her, but her
face showed that she was not thinking of him. No regret
or consciousness of wrong disturbed her.
“Well, I must go,” he said at length.
She seemed about to say something, then changed her
mind and said merely:
“You will come again, I hope. We always seem”—she
hesitated—”to be interrupted.”
He bowed and left the room.
Ralph strode with extreme swiftness along the Embank
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ment. Every muscle was taut and braced as if to resist
some sudden attack from outside. For the moment it
seemed as if the attack were about to be directed against
his body, and his brain thus was on the alert, but without
understanding. Finding himself, after a few minutes, no
longer under observation, and no attack delivered, he
slackened his pace, the pain spread all through him, took
possession of every governing seat, and met with scarcely
any resistance from powers exhausted by their first effort
at defence. He took his way languidly along the river
